The Grain Export Boom: Should It Be Tamed?
Article Summary and Author Biography
I am sorry to say that I see this ravishment of the soil continuing at a faster and faster pace in the past 25 years throughout the Midwest, because of the cheap food policy and extensive exportation of our farm products that are being advocated by our national leaders.
Lauren Soth was the editor of the editorial pages for the Des Moines Register and Tribune from 1954 to 1975. He currently writes a weekly syndicated column, and is the author of An Embarrassment of Plenty, Farm Trouble and other works on agricultural policy, including the farm policy chapter in the 1960 Report of President Eisenhower's Commission on National Goals.
I am sorry to say that I see this ravishment of the soil continuing at a faster and faster pace in the past 25 years throughout the Midwest, because of the cheap food policy and extensive exportation of our farm products that are being advocated by our national leaders.
-Jim Sage, Iowa farmer, in testimony before the soil conservation subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, August 15, 1980.
What many people do not realize is that the bumper crops are coming at the expense of the soil. I am increasingly concerned that the President and Congress do not fully appreciate that Iowa is really "paying" for our reliance on foreign oil, as Iowa farmers help with the balance-of-payments problem through our tremendous exports.
-Robert Lounsberry, Iowa state Secretary of Agriculture, in the same Senate hearings.
United States exports of grain are breaking the record again. Allowing for some overstatement by conservationist farmers of the case attributing soil losses to exports, there is such a case. It deserves public attention. This is a good time for it.
John Block, the new U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, helped start a state soil-conservation program in Illinois where he was Director of the Department of Agriculture. But his enthusiasm for free markets and exports appears to override his concern about soil losses. As a state official, he pushed for export expansion of corn and soybeans, which he raises on his own farm. When he was named to the Reagan Cabinet he said he favored lifting "immediately" the partial embargo on grain exports to the Soviet Union. "Expansion of exports," he said, "is a key to a market-oriented agricultural policy." At the American Farm Bureau's annual meeting in New Orleans on January 12, 1981, he let himself go, declaring that "given the incentive, farmers will respond, and people won't believe how we can produce so much." He said he would oppose any budget cuts in agricultural research or in promotion of exports.
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